Issue 25, Fall 2003

William A. McEachern, Editor

Odds and Ends

Having taught more than ten thousand students over the years, I have heard most of the excuses for missed exams. One common explanation is a death in the family—especially a grandmother. Grandmothers do die, of course, but mortality rates in my large principles class made me want to alert the Center for Disease Control. Ironically, the wildest excuses are usually the most credible (students tend to be risk averse and stick with garden variety excuses). Here's a fractured excuse I once received that I'm sure is true. After a quiz in a discussion section, I received the following message from the student infirmary: "[the student] fell while racing to get to the exam. Leg may be dislocated or fractured. Is on his way to Windham Hospital." Two weeks later, that same student wrote on the cover of his exam: "Please take into consideration that my pain killers make it hard for me to concentrate. Not only did I study while on them, but I needed to take some this morning. Thank you, (student with broken leg)."

In the beauty-contest research discussed on the front page, one sixth of the faculty pictured were dressed more formally-neckties for men and blouse and jacket for women. Twenty years ago this would have been more than half. Could it be that the more formal dress signals better organization or some other attribute that students find appealing? Faculty pictured more formally did in fact earn higher course evaluations, but even after adjusting for this possible bias, the essential findings of the study still held up.

What's the most expensive meat sold at a grocery store? Filet mignon? Porterhouse steak? A new product, ready-crisp bacon, may top the list, selling at $4.29 for a three-ounce package at my local supermarket. That's about $23 a pound. If you like bacon, it's a good buy, considering the time and mess of frying it and disposing of the grease.

When quarterly GDP growth figures were recently revised upward from 0.7% to 1.4%, Mark Haines, host of "Squawk Box" on CNBC, squawked "Economists blew it again." At other times, I have heard him complain, "Economists, what good are they?" Haines has been a news anchor for most of his working life; he is also a lawyer and member of the New Jersey State Bar. Business-show hosts who are lawyers, what good are they?

The Library of Economics and Liberty (http://www.econlib.org/index.html) offers economic resources with a libertarian spin, including a "Concise Encyclopedia of Economics."

Economics and Human Biology published its first issue last January with titles such as "Research Project: A History of Health in Europe from the Late Paleolithic Era to the Present," by Richard Steckel of Ohio State. Abstracts and full text from the first issue are available at http://www.elsevier.com/homepage/sae/econworld/econbase/ehb/frame.htm.

"The mind of every man, in a longer or shorter time, returns to its natural and usual state of tranquility. In prosperity, after a certain time, it falls back to that state; in adversity, after a certain time, it rises up to it." -Adam Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments

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